The funny part about this day is that the point was for me, Dave Moroles and Charles Graves to run Upper Icicle down to Ricochet or the Sieve with Rob and Sam, and then somehow we decided that after watching these guys run the Wall we would run the in-between sections of Tumwater first (skipping Chaos and POW), kind of as an afterthought.

Note to self:  Running anything in Tumwater at 4900 cfs is not in the ‘afterthought’ category, at least not for me.   It’s a good example of how sometimes things just escalate.

Anyway, not long after this video was taken Dave, Charles and I were putting in below the Dam.  Rob, Sam and Darren were a few minutes ahead of us, and Dave was looking a bit grim, understandably – he was in a playboat, and the highest I’ve done Tumwater is 1850 cfs.  Not surprisingly, about 7 seconds after getting on the water (and maybe 12 seconds after telling Dave in a chirpy little voice, ‘Everything’s going to be fine!’), I was upside down in Dam rapid taking what felt like mallet hits to my helmet.  I think I could have rolled up anyway because I’ve rolled up after some pretty massive hits before, but suddenly my paddle hit a rock and the next thing I know it was in two pieces in my hands.  It was a bit like, ‘Hmmm, never done this before’.

I didn’t try rolling up with half a paddle (although I realize now that’s a great thing to practice), so I got to swim pretty much all of Dam rapid – not recommended!  I was really fortunate to walk away with just some major leg bruises because the water is really fast and super shallow at the top – it turns out Darren had flipped there too and taken some major clonks before rolling up.

Anyway, once all the excitement was over (thanks to Dave for retrieving my boat, and Charles for making a solo run down part of Tumwater looking for my paddle that he didn’t know was broken) we ran Icicle from RV down to Ricochet (I walked Limbo, being pretty much topped out on adrenaline for the day) and Charles got this cool video of me, Sam, Dave and Rob running Roadside Attraction rapid.

Thanks to Charles Graves for filming this!  (Due to having to skip the paddle after tweaking his back out getting stuck in a hole for 30 seconds on Tumwater that morning looking for my paddle that broke in half and resulted in my swim through Dam rapid – ouch! But that’s another blog post….)

Anyway, Sam’s in the lead, I’m in the blue and white boat that flips (huge surprise) followed by Rob in the red playboat and then Dave.  Notice how I completely don’t paddle going into that drop that flips me, and then you can hardly see it but after I roll up I do the next drop backwards.  Which surprisingly often works out pretty well – I’ve done it enough times that I’m telling Rob my goal is to eventually do all of Tumwater backwards.  And now maybe Icicle too.   Anyway, first time on Icicle and it was definitely a stretch for my skill level but it was a blast and I would love to do it again, as scary as it was.  (If you haven’t done it yet, it’s definitely a lesson in the ‘it’s bigger than it looks from the road’ department.)

P.S. I should mention that we put in at RV and I walked Limbo and took out at Ricochet.  Then Sam broke HIS paddle on Son of Ricochet.  It was just one of those days when things break, I guess!  Also, this was 875 cfs on the Professor Paddle virtual Icicle gauge.

(Not my video, not my trip – but since I’m short on photos I had to put something on here, and not only is this Ladle Rapid on the Selway, it’s also an amazing testimonial to hanging in there on the roll – gotta love it. )

Anyway, I’m using the fact that I did a 3-day self-support whitewater kayaking trip on the Selway River at the end of May as a partial excuse for not writing even one blog post during that entire month, even though there were plenty of things I wanted to write about.  (And the Selway River trip is a total cover – chalk the non-posting up to basic disorganization, of course.)

Since I managed to do the entire trip without taking one photo I’m hoping some of my paddle-mates cough some of theirs up soon, and in the meantime I’ll point out some cool links about other people’s Selway River trips that I found before I went there in case they’re helpful to anyone planning a trip:

Selway River Photos and Trip Descriptions:

There’s a great article on OregonKayaking.net with really nice Selway River photos of a trip that went from 4.5 feet to 5.5 feet on the Paradise (put-in) gauge.

And there are some good photos on Robin Carleton’s Infinity Mountain site from when he did it at very high water, although I wish he said on there what level that was.

Selway River Info:

The number for the Selway River Office that can tell you what the visual level for the gauge at the put-in is 406-821-3269.  From what I hear up to 3 feet is Class III-IV, 3 to 6 feet is Class IV, and over 6 feet is Class V.

Here’s the page where you can apply for permits for the Selway River, as well as several other permit-only rivers.

The Three Rivers Resort is at the start of the Selway River Road, 18 miles from the take-out.  They have camping, motel rooms, showers and hot tubs – just something to consider if you’re coming off of a multi-day self-support trip.  (Memorial Day weekend is insane there, just so you know.)

How It Went:

This was a really great trip with an awesome group of people, eleven of us total.  When we put on it was 2.9 feet, so a bit on the low side, and basically there were a fair number of beefy class IIIs and some reasonable Class IVs, only two of which really felt kind of hard at that level (for me, not really for anyone else ) – those were Ladle and Wolf Creek.  I can definitely see how at higher flows it could get substantially beefier and there would be some pretty big whirlpools in some of those eddies.  The great news is that the Pyranha Burn rolls just fine with 30 lbs of gear in the stern – what a great boat.

I’ll keep this short since I don’t have photos and who am I kidding, without pictures it’s just me bleating away.  But I really want to thank Dan Patrinellis (the Dan formerly known as Parnell) for organizing the trip and making the whole thing possible as the permit-holder, and also for staying awake and reasonably sane on the 8 hour midnight drive through the back-country of Idaho that ended up with us at the take-out at 5 in the morning.  Also thanks to Charles from AquaSports in Redmond for lending a treasure trove of REI gear for the trip, not to mention a boat for Dan, Darren Albright for organizing transportation and a bunch of other stuff, and to the other eight guys who were on the trip, most of whom I had never met, they were a great group to paddle with and just by being normal and polite they made the fact that I was the only girl on the trip a non-issue, which I really appreciated.  Another reason I love kayaking – it seems to attract really great people.

After the trip Devon, Dirk, and Jon Dufay showed some of us down the Lochsa River, another really fun run.  And it didn’t start raining until we were all done!

Full-screen mode might give a better view since it’s not zoomed in (long story involving a stolen laptop – aargh) but either way you get the drift.  Another great day on the river!

Here’s me and Jason Conlon going through:

Here’s Samson going through the Needle, not Ned’s.  At 2000 cfs it’s really sticky but the more right-to-left line that he takes appears to work well, Charles has said the same thing but a lot of people seem to go left-to-right (I’ve seen good boaters flailing paddles when levels are sticky):

And here’s Adrian going through Ned’s Needle:

Thanks Dave, for taking the videos!  It was an awesome day on the Skykomish, we are so fortunate to have such an interesting Class IV rapid less than an hour from Seattle.

Photo by Gary Luhm, used with permission.

Here’s the link to the Nantahala water boof blog post and video.

Update:  After I posted this Claire told me that not only is this the video that taught her the boof, but when she does this boof now the song from the video actually plays in her head.  Too funny.

Ouch, ouch, and ouch.

So is it foolish to kayak on Friday the 13th?  I’m not superstitious, but as I was heading out to boat that morning I remember thinking how ironic it would be if there ended up being river carnage that day.  As it turns out, I was front and center in the carnage department, but at the same time it was relatively minor, so I’m seriously grateful to have been able to learn a lesson without totally sidelining myself for months.

Anyway, here are some thoughts I’ve had about what happened:

It’s easy to get used to getting away with things.

What happened is that I ended up breaking 3 ribs when I got T-boned by the bow of someone’s kayak while they were surfing and I was coming down a wave train.  It flipped me over and I remember thinking, ‘Holy smokes, I think I really got hurt this time’, but fortunately I was able to roll up and get over to an eddy.  Now apparently (as I’ve heard since then) there’s a river rule that says the upstream kayaker has right of way, but let’s be real - there also has to be an unwritten rule that says the upstream kayaker should avoid acting like a bonehead, and I know I had enough time to get out of this person’s way - I just was being a little lax about paddling hard.  Usually you get away with that stuff with some flips and apologies, this time I didn’t.

Snow billows through Index as we put in.

Little mistakes can have big consequences.

I think for most kayakers it’s a lot easier to consider getting hurt and dealing with pain than it is to think about the amount of time they’ll have to take off of paddling.  They told me six weeks and I’m hoping it’s four, but poor Fish Waidelich, who’s an amazing kayaker, dislocated his shoulder recently and is out for months – recently he was on Professor Paddle begging people to take him down river in a raft, and (paddlers being the people they are) he got lots of offers right away.  But seriously – from what I hear, he got hurt on a class III section, and he’s a class V paddler.  So I guess it’s worth keeping that kind of thing in mind.  Although at the same time, if you think too much about what can go wrong you’ll never leave the house.  (Martha Stewart reruns, anyone? )

Your paddle group is your lifeline.

I was fortunate to be paddling with a great group of people who did everything they could to make things safer and easier.  Everyone took the time to figure out what was going on, Brett Barton carried both his and my boat off the river and through the woods for half an hour up to the road, the guys from Peak 7 happened to come along and give us a ride up to Index, JP and Dave Morales drove me back to my house, and Dave didn’t make me feel bad about committing his afternoon to taking me to the hospital when it turned out  I couldn’t drive.  You seriously want to paddle with people like this.

We are blessed with amazing capacity to heal.

I know most people know that, but I have to emphasize – I am completely mind-boggled at how much better I feel just over a week later.  When I got to the hospital on Friday I could barely walk, and on Sunday I couldn’t clear my throat, even on Percocet.  By Wednesday, however, I was off of painkillers and actually tried a slow jog (then got walloped on Facebook by my clear-thinking friends.)  Today is nine days later and I can breathe in just fine – sneezing is not agonizing, I can run (although I’m not) and I’m just watching out for my left arm and shoulder blade, which I can tell will take longer.  If you had told me last Sunday that I’d feel like this today, I would have snorted in disbelief – and then toppled over in agony.  It’s truly amazing.

So in the end…

I’m not trying to sound like Polyanna.  It’s not fun to have broken ribs (other than the outpouring of sympathy, including fellow paddler Marilyn Ridings showing up on Sunday with a full grocery list and flowers – thanks Marilyn!)  But who are we kidding – any time you get the opportunity to learn a potentially life-saving lesson without losing a bunch of teeth or rupturing a shoulder (the point being, obviously, that you’d be off the river for a long time with those injuries ) there’s not that much to complain about, right?  I’m calling it good, and hoping to be smarter and better when I get back out there.

Clear skies and fresh snow on the way back.

Brian, Blake and Austin from Peak 7 Adventures at the Skykomish put-in in Index.

Yesterday three Peak 7 guys, Brian, Blake, and Austin, who are from Spokane and doing some local rivers this weekend, stopped on Highway 2 to give me and Brett Barton a ride into Index, and seeing as I had just broken 3 ribs and hiked off the river for 30 minutes I REALLY appreciated it – plus they had a truck crammed full of kayaking gear, so it was nice of them to fit us in.  (By the way, the reason I call myself a bonehead in the post title is that the accident was totally my fault – but that’s another blog post… )

Blake gave me some encouraging words in the car about how he had bruised some ribs once and they really hurt but healed quickly, but after seeing me lurching around the car in Index his verdict was, “Umm, you should probably get that checked out.” :)

Anyway, the Peak 7 motto is “Challenging the Body, Engaging the Spirit”, which I think is very cool, and their website is well worth checking out.  They’re also hiring a full-time Seattle area director, so if that’s up your alley click here for info – the application deadline is 12/15/09.

The actual best video would have been of me actually getting up onto Split Rock to take the video, which involved having to stand on the nose of Brett’s boat as he was paddling against the current and then throwing myself onto the side of the rock.  Oh well, you never have a camera rolling for the truly great shots.

Here’s Rob and Brett checking out the video with the super-nice waitress from the Gold Bar cafe (great desserts, by the way – huge pieces of pie.)